


Ice Ice Baby

by wanttobeatree



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Civil War (Marvel), Gen, M/M, Multiverse, Post-Civil War (Marvel), cyberpunk elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27119719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: NB This is anincomplete, abandoned work, posted for the Good Intentions WIP Fest.After Steve's death on the courthouse steps, he wakes up in another universe; a universe where Captain America was never rescued from the ice, where meta-humans are vilified and superheroes have been driven underground, where the Avengers fell apart years ago... and Tony fell apart with them.
Relationships: Steve Rogers & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	Ice Ice Baby

**Author's Note:**

> A decade ago I signed up to a Steve/Tony reverse Big Bang on LJ, picked some really cool cyberpunk art, got very excited... and completely underestimated how stressful and busy my final year of uni was going to be. Come the weekend of the deadline, I bashed this much out over two days on a university loaned laptop, because my own had died, realised how much longer I still had to go and promptly burnt out.
> 
> In the end notes I've tried my best to summarise what I remember of what was supposed to happen.

/iceicebaby  
/program: wakeupnow  
/command: run

*

\--and then suddenly the world tears apart.

There’s something packed into his lungs and in his eyes, so that when he tries to shout his mouth won’t open and when he tries to blink his eyelids drag, heavy and unwilling; there is a sliver of light between his lashes, too bright to stand – everything loud and shaking – air raid? Steve thinks, and then _wait, no_ — the light, growing whiter and brighter and everything so cold it burns.

He falls away again.

*

The next time is slower, and softer. Steve groans, rolling onto his side and spitting out a mouthful of warm, salty water. Another fives minutes, just five more, and then he’ll get up and start fighting this war again. His limbs ache. His lungs are burning.

“Congratulations, Captain,” someone says. “You’re one hundred per cent thawed.”

Steve knows that voice.

“ _Tony?_ ” he snarls, sitting up – or trying to, but his arms won’t hold and his head is heavier than it ought to be. He slumps back against the thin mattress, but he remembers now. The manacles, the shot, and then the choking pain that spread through his stomach and Sharon, Sharon’s face. And the noise, and the cold, and the bright, white light.

“What,” he grits out, throwing an arm across his face, “did you do, Stark?”

There’s a pause. Steve lifts his arm, chancing a look at Tony – at _Stark_ , who’s sitting a few feet away and staring at him with his mouth. He looks different, somehow, and Steve’s vision is too blurry to make out their surroundings but he knows, is certain, it’s somewhere he’s never been before. 

“I, uh, well, I thawed you,” Stark says. He laughs sharply, running a hand through his hair. “It was exciting. I figured we were going to have a dramatic introduction and I’d get to say ‘welcome to the world of tomorrow’ or something, but apparently they’re delivering New Scientist to the icecaps now.”

Steve manages to sit up. It hurts, but there’s a sinking feeling in his guts and he needs to look Stark in the eyes and ask: “What year is it?”

“Twenty-ten.”

“So I lose two years and you think we need introducing?” He snorts, lets himself sink back down onto his bed. Maybe Stark froze him again. Hell, maybe they held Steve’s trial without him and he’s in Stark’s latest prison. “I’d ask if you were out of your mind, but…”

Stark isn’t saying anything. Steve twists to look at him, to check that he hasn’t sneaked away and left Steve without answers again, but he hasn’t moved. Stark is just staring at him. His eyes are very, very wide.

“Captain,” Stark says. “ _Steve_. It’s twenty-ten. You haven’t been in the ice for two years. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Two thousand ten. Two-oh-one-oh. Look, I’ll write it down for you.” 

He gets up, fumbling in his pockets for a pen, but Steve’s had enough.

“I understand the date just fine, Stark,” he says. “It’s everything else I’m having trouble with, here.”

Stark lowers his hands. He’s staring again. Steve stares back. 

Finally, “You haven’t missed two years,” Stark says, softly. He sinks back down into his chair and pulls it closer to the bedside, close enough that he can reach out and touch Steve’s arm and Steve – Steve can see Stark’s face clearly now, every sharp line of it. It isn’t Stark’s face. It isn’t Steve’s Stark. 

“You’ve missed _sixty-five_ ,” says this world’s Tony Stark.

*

It takes days for Steve’s body to start feeling like his own again. The alien sensation creeps from his limbs in inches, until he is able to sit up without falling back down again seconds later and then, at last, able to stand and to walk. It’s Steve’s body, all right; fresh from fighting in the War. Steve’s mind, on the other hand, is fresh from a different war all together. He tries not to think about what’s happening in his absence, only about how to get back to it.

“It could have been Reed Richards,” he says.

Stark – Tony – is never far away, throughout it all. In the absence of clocks or calendars or what seems like regular mealtimes, Steve measures the passing of hours in Tony’s routine. When he’s sitting at the huge bank of surveillance monitors embedded in the wall, Steve works out until his limbs are aching. When he’s hunched over his workstation with his back to Steve, Steve slowly explores the cave. Steve’s Tony Stark had never worked in a cave. He liked heights and bright white spaces. Steve’s Tony Stark didn’t like caves.

“Your Reed Richards or my Reed Richards?” Tony asks. He’s fiddling with a tiny pair of pliers and an even tinier circuit board. “Hang on – put your finger here.”

Steve obliges, pressing down carefully on a loose wire. “Either. Mine’s…” He pauses, the memory twisting in his gut. “Mine’s on your side.”

Tony hums under his breath. “My side, huh?” He nudges Steve’s finger out of the way with his hand and solders the wire into place. “Could be him, then. Getting you out of the way by sending you to an alternate universe. Sneaky. Pass me that screwdriver. No, the other screwdriver.”

Rolling his eyes, Steve hands Tony the second screwdriver. It apparently signals the end of the conversation, as Tony twists away on his desk chair and sets about examining the circuitry from all angles. With a sigh, Steve turns to lean against the desk, sticking his hands in his pockets. He’s still wearing his uniform, in all its battle-worn, frozen and thawed glory. One day soon, he’ll need some new clothes. He’ll need to contact whatever scientists this world has to offer. He’ll need to leave.

The cave is vast and cavernous and dim, and the one – thick, steel, reinforced – door stands in the rock face like it’s the very end of the universe. For all Steve knows, it could be.

“You do have a Reed Richards, don’t you?” he asks, suddenly uneasy. “Other people? Other places?”

Tony glances up at him, eyebrow raised. 

“Yes, Captain, we have people and places. I didn’t bring you all the way back from the Arctic and thaw you out so nicely just so we could lurk underground in a post-apocalyptic wasteland for all eternity, fun though that sounds. Come over here.”

“What about Reed?”

“Come over here,” Tony repeats, looking away. “I need you to hold my arm down.”

“Reed,” Steve says. He doesn’t move.

Tony stares up at him, then sighs and throws his hands up. “Jesus, all right. What, did they give you the super soldier serum just to stop you badgering them? Arm,” he adds pointedly.

Steve takes hold of Tony’s wrist and presses it down against the surface of the desk. His wrist is bony, he notes. He can’t remember ever actually seeing Tony eat in the few days he’s been down here.

“Okay,” Tony says, flexing his fingers against Steve’s grip. “Yes, we have Reed. We have the whole happy Fantastic Four family. Somewhere,” he adds, softly. He doesn’t look at Steve as he picks up the screwdriver and pushes at Steve’s fingers. “Move your hand up. Half an inch should do it.”

“Somewhere?”

“Move,” Tony says. “Uncle Tony can tell you a story and work at the same time. Oh, and pass me that towel. This patch is mostly synthetic, but it can get messy.”

Steve has moved his hand and passed the towel before Tony’s words catch up with him. “Wait, what are we doing here--?” he begins, but Tony has already plunged the screwdriver into his forearm.

“Jesus!” Steve shouts, reaching forward with his free hand to grab at the screwdriver, but Tony is hunched down over it, breathing deeply, his arm shaking and straining against Steve’s grip as he – Steve pauses, hand dropping – as he unscrews a tiny screw.

“Gotcha,” Tony mutters, drawing the screw out and dropping it into a Petri dish. He folds back the flap of loosened skin, revealing the circuitry beneath. It’s covered in a layer of silvery liquid, which Tony carefully wipes away with the towel. Then he glances up at Steve and grins. “Oh, don’t be such a baby. It only stings a little.”

“What – Tony. Are you a _robot?_ ”

“No,” Tony says slowly. He’s fiddling with the circuitry in his arm, carefully detaching it and inching it out of place. “I’m human. I’m probably more human than you are, Mr. Serum. Turn that light on, would you? Thanks.”

The silvery liquid seems to come alive in the light, swirling agitatedly with an incandescent glow as Tony pulls the circuit board out of the gap in his arm. His hand goes suddenly, startlingly limp in the circuitry’s absence and Steve tries to ignore the feel of it beneath his grip, and he tries to ignore the glimpses – beneath the revealed panel of metal and the miniscule golden wiring – of Tony’s bare muscle.

“The nanites keep the blood at bay,” Tony explains casually. He discards the screwdriver and slots the new circuit board into his arm, fixing it in place with a flurry of one-handed activity that Steve can’t decipher. Tony’s hand spasms and he hisses out a breath. “Okay, that stings a lot.”

Flexing his freshly resurrected fingers, Tony smooths the loose flap of skin back into place with his other hand. It all seems to knit back together, edges disappearing into one smooth, solid plane of skin. Steve can just make out the hole where the screw goes, before Tony screws it back in and that, too, disappears.

Tony lets out a long, slow sigh, sagging back in his seat. “There. Good as new. Or rather, better than new. You can let go now.”

Steve does, running his hand down Tony’s forearm. There are no discernible edges, or changes in texture, or _anything_ to mark the difference, except maybe – and only maybe – a slight decrease in temperature. A coldness where the metal lies.

“What I am,” Tony says, answering the questions before Steve can voice them, “is a complex blend of organic and genetically coded synthetic fibres plus technological enhancements. I’ve upgraded.”

Steve swallows. His hand drops to his side. At length, “And you couldn’t have told me this before shoving a screwdriver into your arm?”

“Hey, I’ve gotta have fun somehow.”

“And distract me from my questions about Reed and his family while you’re at it?” 

Tony seems to slump beneath Steve’s gaze, or beneath Steve’s words, drawing in on himself as he cradles his arm against his torso. “Right, right. Not now, okay? My arm hurts. We’ll talk later,” he adds, rolling his eyes at Steve’s unmoving presence. “Scout’s honour. Cross heart, hope to die.”

“Fine.” Steve turns, heading back to his cot. “But Tony, I swear to God, if you don’t let me out of this cave soon, I will snap and kill you next time you rope me into your home surgery.”

“Homicidal cabin fever. Message received.”

Steve sits, and scrubs a hand across his face, and draws in a deep breath. When he looks up again, Tony is still sitting hunched at his desk, back to Steve, holding onto himself. He doesn’t move while Steve is working his way through his regime of push-ups and chin-ups. He doesn’t move while Steve picks his way through a clammy microwave pizza. He doesn’t move while Steve lies down and goes to sleep. He doesn’t move at all.

*

Steve dreams of the cave, and of Sharon’s face looking down on him, her mouth soundlessly moving while Steve loses himself in the labyrinth, searching for the steel door that keeps moving, that is just just just out of reach—

It’s the sound of voices that draws him out of his uneasy sleep, jumbled and disoriented. He’s in the ice. He’s in the manor. He’s in the New Avengers’ hide out in the middle of the Civil War. He’s in a cold, dark cave in an alternate universe. Steve rubs his eyes, sitting up. It’s night time, probably, as the lights are out and twenty feet away the wall of surveillance monitors has cast an eerie glow on Tony’s face. 

“Take the left,” Tony is murmuring into a microphone, his eyes fixed on the screen. “No, I don’t care what your intel says. I know more than your intel and I say go left. Mr. O’s men are waiting for you on the right. Oh, that gets you going, doesn’t it? Hey, if I told you Mr. O was hiding in my dirty laundry would you guys come fight it for me?”

“Tony?” Steve says.

Tony jumps, swears, dropping the mic. It skitters across the monitor console and onto the floor, chased by Tony’s hands. As Steve approaches, he can hear a tinny little voice drifting out of the radio. _T… T… are you there, T?_

Tony swipes the mic up and shoots Steve a glare. “I’m here. Everything’s fine. Just my, uh, cat startled me. Gotta go now bye,” he finishes off quickly, flipping a series of switches. The radio static cuts off midway through the tinny voice’s sentence and the monitors die down, column by column, with a plaintive hum. 

“I need eyes in the sides of my head as well, apparently,” Tony says, once everything has shut off. 

“Sorry.” Steve shrugs, not particularly sorry. “What was that about?”

“Nothing important.” 

Tony’s expression is unreadable, the cave thrown into shadow in the absence of the electrical glow, but there’s a faint, silvery light coming from – somewhere. From the cave walls themselves, Steve realises, craning to stare up at the shining roof.

“Nanites again,” Tony supplies. “They hold the cave up, they hold my innards in. One day I’ll train them to cook and clean and then I’ll be sitting pretty.”

Steve glances at him. Tony’s head is thrown back, admiring his own glittering handiwork. His eyes are glittering too. It’s an expression Steve recognises from his own Tony Stark, back home, showing off his latest Iron Man upgrade or a new and hideously expensive modern art purchase or a perfect view. It’s an expression Steve hasn’t seen in what feels like a very, very long time.

He swallows down on that sudden rising swell of loss, and he focuses. “If you won’t tell me about your secret late night phone calls, then tell me _something_. Anything. Tell me what happened to Reed and Sue. Tell me what’s happening outside. Tell me something.”

“You’re like a dog with a bone, aren’t you?” 

Tony sighs, leaning back in his chair. He crosses his arms behind his head and crosses his legs at the ankles, smirking with a twist of irony. “Your world isn’t perfect. Guess what, neither is mine. Your world, people are starting to distrust superheroes and metahumans. My world, superheroes, metas – they haven’t had that trust for a very long time. If ever.

“Reed and Sue were arrested, four, five years ago. Ben’s gone so far underground he’s probably dug all the way to China by now. I hear Johnny’s fine, though.”

“What about the kids?”

“The kids?”

“Franklin. Valeria.” Steve stares at Tony, but Tony is staring back, just as perplexed. “Reed and Sue’s kids, Tony. What about them?”

“Jesus, they – I’m sorry, Steve,” Tony is saying, shaking his head, and Steve is leaning forwards and grabbing Tony by the shoulder, a white noise in his head where thoughts used to be. “No, I mean, nothing happened. They aren't anywhere. Nothing happened to the kids, because Reed and Sue never _had_ kids.”

Steve’s hand drops. Then he lifts it up again and presses his hand against his mouth. 

“They never had any kids,” Tony says again, with a helpless shrug. “No meta does if they can help it. It’s suicide.”

“What are you saying?”

Tony grins sharply and without humour. In the darkness, his eyes and his teeth shine brightly and for a disorienting second it’s all that Steve can see, as if he’s in conversation with the Cheshire Cat, or a shark, and whichever it is it’s about to bite Steve’s head off.

“I’m saying, welcome to the world of tomorrow, where the government steals your children.” Tony spreads his hands and adds, in a voice filled with venom, “Ta-da.”

Steve sits down, heavily, on the first flat surface he can find. It turns out to be a corner of the surveillance monitor console and switches dig uncomfortably into the backs of his thighs, but Steve ignores it. 

“That’s not possible,” he says. “What about the Avengers? What about _you_ – Iron Man? Why aren’t you doing something?”

Tony shakes his head. “I’m not Iron Man.”

“Yes, you are,” Steve says, dumbly.

“No, I am _not_ ,” Tony snaps. Then he scrubs a hand across his face and his voice softens. “I was. For, I don’t know, five years, I was Iron Man. But I was drinking too much and trying to lead the Avengers at the same time and I _fucked up_. Bad. Rhodey took over for a couple years, but he was risking his real career and he couldn’t keep that up. So there’s no Iron Man, there’s no Avengers, there’s nothing.”

“There must be something. Someone.”

There’s a pause, Tony staring out into the cave. 

“I never really know how safe it is down here,” he murmurs, more to himself than to Steve. “Pretty damn safe, I figure. Unless they’re just toying with me? I don’t know.” 

He stands, abruptly, pushing away from the console and his chair rolls freely a few inches, the castor wheels rumbling too loud in a half-empty cave. “Conversation over. I’m going to bed.”

Steve stares after him as Tony strides away. There seems no point in stopping him; Steve’s never known any Tony Stark to willingly keep talking after he’s pronounced a conversation so definitively _over_. But then again, this Tony isn’t Iron Man, and this Tony has hidden himself away in a cave, and this world is already so different. 

He stands, in time to hear the steel door close. The locks click-click-click into place and then the cave is silent again. Steve sighs, suddenly exhausted by the journey back to his cot. He’s locked in a cave by a man who looks just like the man he was ready to kill just a couple weeks ago, but Steve doesn’t feel like he's a prisoner. So he sleeps.

*

In the morning, Tony greets him with a jacket and a pair of shoes. They’re both a perfect fit, which he waves away with a vague “I have a man on the outside” when Steve questions it. Neither of them feel like talking after last night’s conversations, so Steve lets it slide and pulls the clothes on.

“You can get away with the jeans, and we can hide your patriotic torso,” Tony says once Steve’s dressed, “but nobody in the world can get away with those pirate boots.”

“They’re not pirate boots,” Steve protests.

Tony just raises an eyebrow, the yeah right visible on his face, but then he shrugs and motions with a hand for Steve to follow him – out of the cave and up into the great unknown.

*

The great unknown is, it turns out one elevator ride later, the Avengers’ Mansion basements. Steve gapes as Tony swings the metal wall panel back into place, hiding the elevator from view. 

“Are you kidding me?” Steve laughs. “We were here all along? I thought we were in your super secret lair.”

He looks around, taking in the exits and the shape of the room. Back home this would have been the equipment storage room, he realises, but here the room is empty. Still, there is the familiar door to the familiar elevator.

“Hey, it _is_ super secret. Only three living people know it exists and you’re one of them.” Tony watches curiously as Steve leads the way into the elevator, all too familiar. “I take it you know Stark Manor, then.”

Steve grins, thumbing the ground floor button. The little beeping noise and the rustle the door makes as it slides shut is exactly the same as the ones he knows. “I lived here until a couple years ago. You – or, he, I guess. He let me move in after I came up out of the ice with nowhere to go. It became the Avengers HQ and a superhero hotel all rolled into one, in the end. Avengers Mansion.”

“I offered my team rooms here,” Tony says. “But they turned me down. We were trying to keep things professional.”

There’s a note of bitterness in his voice, Steve notices. There often is, with this Tony. Steve shrugs, rolling his shoulders – he’s practically back to normal now; no lasting side effects from the ice – and they lapse into silence for the remainder of the elevator ride. At the top, Steve steps out into the gallery ready to breathe a sigh of relief at the sight and feel of something familiar, but the place is empty and too, too silent. The air hangs heavy with dust and what few pictures and artefacts there are out on display have been covered by dust sheets. It feels dead.

Jarvis would never let the mansion get like this, Steve knows. And Jarvis would never let his Master Stark get this tangled up in himself.

“Tony, what about Jar—“ Steve begins but is swiftly cut off by Tony’s hand over his mouth.

“Don’t,” Tony whispers. “Don’t. Shit. Sorry, I should've - When we’re upstairs, we’re not safe. Hell, even downstairs we're probably not completely safe. The walls could quite literally have ears. Keep your head down and don’t draw attention to yourself. Understand?” 

Steve nods against Tony’s hand and feels the grip loosen, although Tony leans in even closer. His voice drops to the barest hint of a whisper: “He’s alive, he’s fine, he lives close by.” 

Then he pulls away and claps his hands together, his grin brittle. “Now how about a nice stroll through the city, Dave?”

“That sounds swell,” Steve agrees, with all the fake cheer he can muster.

*

They buy Steve a few fresh changes of clothes and then they grab some lunch, acting all the while like they’re old colleagues playing catch-up in the big city. It feels like they’re on a mission, which steadies Steve, in a way. He’s doing reconnaissance on an alien world that just happens to look like his home town, and if the loudness and heady rush of it all seems no different from usual, it’s just a cunning subterfuge. There is something hidden beneath the surface, and Steve knows it.

There are no obvious tourists, he realises as they walk – as they amble, in no hurry, no siree – back to the manor. Maybe no tourists at all. Whatever this city is now, it’s not a place people want to go to for fun. He looks around, at all the faces passing by. They’re here because they need to be. 

_So why did Tony bring_ me _here_ , he wonders. _Why not leave me in the ice?_

“Dave,” Tony calls. “Dave! Keep up.”

Steve glances up, startled from his reverie. Tony is a good six or seven feet ahead by now, twisting around to stare expectantly over his shoulder at Steve. He needs to focus, he needs to pay attention. He hurries to catch up and – there is a flash of red and blue swinging in the corner of his eye. Steve turns, craning, searching the sky and the buildings in that flash of a direction that he saw. And there’s Spider-man, almost invisible against the redbrick he’s clinging to. His costume is dim, the red earthier and the blue greyer; the Spider-man equivalent of camouflage. Steve grins. He shields his eyes against the glare, just watching, as Spidey throws out an arm and—

“No no no no no,” Tony is hissing. “Don’t watch, don’t, stop--” and then he grabs Steve by the arm and twists him away. Steve stumbles, startled. He has to catch himself on Tony’s shoulders; Tony’s shoulders that are trembling, and there is Tony’s pale, panicked face staring up at him.

“I didn’t say anything,” Steve whispers. 

Tony shakes his head. “Not here,” he says, and he turns on his heel and weaves a path through the small crowd that has apparently formed around Steve. He’s a big guy; when he stops in the middle of the sidewalk and stares up at something, people tend to notice. Perhaps the wrong people noticed. Stomach sinking, Steve quickly follows after Tony through the crowd.

Tony is waiting for him in the mouth of an alleyway half a block away, tying and retying his shoelace. He unties it again as Steve approaches, then says, loudly, “Dave. I think I need new shoelaces.”

“You should’ve thought of that back in all those clothes stores we went through,” Steve says. He crouches down next to Tony. Waits.

“Don’t ask me how they’ve done it,” Tony says, looping his laces around a finger. “I am a _fantastic_ engineer, but he’s got a whole fleet of great engineers. One or two of them might even be better than me. And they all clubbed together – or were held at gunpoint together, I don’t know – and built a really clever computer.”

“You’re a really clever computer,” Steve points out.

“Oh honey, the sweet talk.” Tony finishes tying his lace and leaves it this time, the façade dropped. He reaches for Steve’s hand instead, tucking his fingers up against the palm. “But I’m not. I’m just a really clever man with some thrilling computer components. This is… It’s always watching, and it’s always listening, and it…”

He trails off. His fingers are moving on the palm of Steve’s hand, again and again. The same, repetitive shapes. S. E.

“It reaches logical conclusions,” Tony says. N. T. “It makes educated guesses. If it sees a bunch of people staring up into the sky, it starts to wonder what the hell they’re all looking at.”

R.Y. Steve nods, squeezing Tony’s hand. _Message received._

“So maybe it’s a really clever man, too,” he says. “With a lot of computer components. Back home, it’s – he’s a man.”

“You know what the worst part is?” Tony laughs, a little too brightly. “I wouldn’t put it past them. Tell me they’re building a computer out of the skulls of kittens and I’d probably believe you.”

He belatedly pulls his hand out of Steve’s grasp and rubs his face. He stares down at his shoes for a long moment, until Steve is about ready to check he’s still conscious; and that’s when Tony looks up again. His gaze skips past Steve’s face, out of the alley and into the streets.

“Hey Dave, I think I got my shoelace tied,” he says.

They stand, and they walk back home.

*

It takes another couple of days - of Steve drifting through the cave when he’s not working out, examining everything on the long metal shelves and in the dusty boxes, picking things up and wondering _would my Tony have this?_ ; and of Tony staring fixedly up at his bank of monitors, but never saying a word – for Tony to decide things are safe and they can relax again.

He comes up to Steve while Steve is busy trying to make tolerable coffee in the microwave, and he says, “Things could get hairy, Captain. I figure I shouldn’t leave you unarmed.”

Steve blinks, sips his intolerable coffee, and says, “Okay then?”

He ends up sitting at Tony’s work station, squinting in the harsh light of a surgical lamp. Tony is somewhere behind it, but the light is too bright to make him out – he’s just a darker shape moving in the darkness, pacing back and forth as his voice drifts out of the air.

“If there’s one thing Captain America needs, it’s a shield. Maybe one day we can go back to the ice and find it, but at the time it didn’t seem as important as getting you the hell out of there. I can’t recreate the vibranium-iron alloy – well,” Tony pauses, coming around the desk and back into Steve’s sight. He’s brandishing a tailor’s tape measure. “Given enough time, maybe I could. But we don’t have that kind of time, so it’s going to have be a whole new shield. Which arm’s your throwing arm?”

Steve holds out his arm. Tony sits down on the edge of his desk and sets about measuring it: shoulder to wrist, and then breaking down into smaller units. Shoulder to elbow. Elbow to wrist. Circumferences.

“What was so important about getting me out of the ice?” Steve asks as he watches Tony work.

Tony pauses, looping the tape measure around Steve’s bicep. “Flex,” he says. 

Steve flexes, and Tony carefully notes down the new measurement. Then he looks up. “I know I haven’t been completely clear with you. That hasn’t been fair. I can’t drag you out of an icecap – hell, maybe out of an entire parallel universe – and then not tell you what’s going on. But I’m a secretive person, and I haven’t had to share my secrets in…” He pauses, hands loosening as he looks away; Steve follows his gaze to the surveillance monitors. “In a long time. So ask whatever questions you need to ask, but trust me if I say I can’t tell you something. Deal?”

“Deal.” Steve nods, holding out his free hand. It takes a moment, Tony just staring down at it, but then he’s grinning and he’s reaching out. They shake on it.

“Great. Give me your hand. Other hand, shield hand. That’s it.” He tugs Steve closer, the chair’s castor wheels rolling obligingly, until Steve’s hand is practically in his lap. He spreads the tape measure from the top of his wrist to the tip of his index fingers, then whistles as he notes down the measurement. “Big hands. You know what they say about _that_. Now spread your fingers as wide as you can.”

“Tony,” Steve says. “The ice.”

Tony sighs, lowering the tape measure. His hands rest lightly on Steve’s wrist. 

“Okay. I... wasn’t the only person looking for you. I got there first because I’ve always been a bit of a Captain America fanboy,” he says with a smirk. “So I had a pretty accurate idea where in the ice you were. And I had to get to you first – I _had_ to – because I was looking for _you_ and they were just looking for what makes you so special. And I don’t mean your dreamy blue eyes.”

“The serum.” Steve sighs and Tony nods grimly. “But who? Why?”

“Mr. O. Osborne, Norman Osborne,” he amends at Steve’s sharp look. “He’s had the government in his pocket for years now. He’s the one running this city. He’s the one doing what he wants to get what he wants, and what he wants is superpowers. All of them.”

“He’s a lunatic,” Steve breathes. 

Tony snorts with laughter. “You’re telling me.” He slides off of the desk, dislodging Steve’s hand from its place in his lap, and he yanks open a drawer. The tape measure goes into it, then a small video camera comes out. Tony waves a hand in the direction of the empty floor space. “Go stand over there and mime throwing a shield.”

Steve hesitates, staring up into the camera lens.

“I’m filming muscle movement, Steve, not porn. Go on. Wait, no.” He pulls open another drawer and, after a moment of riffling around, withdraws a square of scrap metal. “Is this roughly the right weight?”

Steve takes the proffered metal, hefts in his hands. “It’s close.” So close that he can feel his body responding to it, his blood pressure rising and his muscles unwinding in preparation for battle.

“Go pretend it’s round and shiny and speaks to your soul.”

He steps out onto the floor. When he glances back over his shoulder, Tony’s face is obscured by the camera. The little red light is flashing where his eyes would be, so Steve focuses on that when he asks his next question. “Is Osborne trying to recreate the super soldier serum? He must know nobody’s ever managed it.”

He mimes a basic throw. Drop the knees, flick the wrist. It’s all in the wrist. In his mind, he can feel the shield spin. It would have been a good throw.

“No,” Tony says, from behind the camera. “He wants to extract it from you. He’s – we think he’s the one orchestrating the latest rise in meta-hate. Relations were never great after what happened with the Avengers, but now? Nobody’s going to kick up a fuss if someone comes and takes a super-powered kid away, because they figure that kid was probably born evil anyway. And the kids – they’re not strong enough to fight back.”

Steve spins around into a throw, feeling the momentum tug at the scrap metal in his grip. Then before he’s finished moving, he’s ducking down, aiming the shield to skim across the floor and take out an opponent’s ankles. When he straightens, he turns back to the camera. 

“And Osborne thinks he can extract meta DNA and, what, synthesise a superpower from it? Is that even possible?”

The red light flashes at him, and flashes at him, and flashes at him.

“Tony?”

“It’s possible,” Tony says. “I don’t know if Osborne can do it yet, but it’s definitely possible. He, uh... he stole the tech from me.”

Steve drops his piece of metal. He can feel the shield drop from his fingers too, the imaginary weight disappearing, the game over. “You were extracting superpowers? What the hell were you _thinking?_ And would you please,” he adds, striding across the distance and tugging the video camera out of Tony’s grasp, “ _look at me_ when I’m talking to you.”

Tony backs up under Steve’s glare, backs up until he’s against the edge of his desk and can go no further, and then he raises his hands in placation and says, “Wait, wait, wait.”

Steve is a lot bigger than Tony, he reminds himself. And stronger too, especially in this world without Iron Man. He takes a step back, breathing out slowly. In this world, Tony Stark probably isn’t a threat.

“We weren’t interested in giving ourselves new powers,” Tony says quickly. “Or in giving anyone new powers. Reed, and Hank Pym and I, we were just interested. We thought – you know, every time a new super villain pops up, he always manages to steal someone’s power somehow. What if we could just give it back to them? Or if we could break down the genetic code of someone’s abilitier, we could use it to design custom weaponry that truly works _with_ the powers instead of as a separate entity. I thought I could still be... of some small use to the cause.” He spreads his hands under Steve’s gaze. “It wasn’t an innately bad idea.”

“Until it fell into the wrong hands.”

“Yeah.” Tony smiles wryly. “And now Norman Osborne’s our evil overlord, Hank’s dead, Reed’s so deep in the prison system he might never get out, and I go to AA meetings in disguise.”

“It always falls into the wrong goddamn hands.”

Suddenly exhausted, Steve drops down into the desk chair. He turns the video camera over and over in his hands, thinking about erasing the video file or maybe just throwing it against the cave wall and storming away from Tony, storming all the way out into the streets of Manhattan to find – what? A Spider-man he can’t even look at. A city weighed down by the Sentry’s watch. He sighs and places the camera carefully on the desk.

“I’m sorry,” Tony murmurs. He’s still smiling a little when Steve looks up at him, a rueful twist to his lips. “I think you might have ended up in the one universe worse than your own.”

“It wasn’t all bad. Actually, mostly it was great,” Steve admits. “Until you and the government went insane.”

Tony raises his hand and, after a second of quiet hesitation, places it on Steve’s shoulder. Steve closes his eyes, focusing on the sensation of simply being touched. It seems like forever since he last felt it. Sharon’s face rises in his mind unbidden, her lips moving soundlessly over him. The courthouse steps beneath him. The blood pulsing out of him. 

“Who were you talking to on the radio?” he asks.

Tony’s hand clenches. “Steve…”

“Please,” Steve says, grabbing hold of Tony’s wrist as he begins to pull away. “I need to know if we’re alone in this.”

Tony stares at him for a long, long moment. Then his arm goes limp in Steve’s grasp, and he sighs. “There’s a group. I’m not a real part of it and I don’t know who they all are – most of them are after Iron Man’s time – but they call themselves the New Avengers. They’re trying to make a difference. I figure what’s the point in being part man, part machine if you can’t block Big S’s gaze once in a while and tell a kid he’s taking the wrong turning?”

“Once in a while,” Steve echoes. “Once in a while? Tony, with your knowledge and surveillance you could be _running_ that team, not just… dropping in on special occasions.”

“No.”

Tony is shaking his head, pulling from Steve’s hand and Steve is tightening his grip and saying, “Tony, come on--”

“ _No_ ,” Tony snaps, yanking his arm away. “I’m not a superhero. I’m not some covert vigilante. I tried it once and I sucked at it. It was a total fucking disaster. When I was a superhero, people died. You understand? Because of me, people died.”

“I fought in a war,” Steve says softly. “A whole lot of people died.”

__“As a direct result of your incompetence?” Tony waits, waits until Steve has to look away. “No, I didn’t think so. You, Steve Rogers – You, _Captain America_ , you were designed to be the perfect leader. Me, I design myself and I redesign myself and I make upgrade after upgrade, and it doesn’t make a lick of difference. I’m still Anthony E. Stark, alcoholic failure.”__

____

____

“Okay,” Steve says. He lays his hand on Tony’s arm, tugging him so they’re both facing the wall of surveillance. “I’m sorry. But if you’re not fighting in your own way, then why do you have a camera on every street corner? That seems one awful lot like vigilantism to me.”

“That’s nothing to do with me. It’s for someone else. She just wants me to watch–” He cuts himself off abruptly, mouth snapping shut, and then he drops his face into his hands. “It’s nothing to do with this. You’ve asked your questions, now go away.”

“Okay,” Steve says again. He hesitates anyway, waiting for Tony to lift his head, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but nothing is forthcoming. Eventually Steve stands, giving Tony’s arm a quick squeeze as he passes by.

“Wait,” Tony says, his voice muffled in his hands. “I need a sample of your DNA. For the shield. Don’t worry, I’m not going to extract the serum,” he adds. He lifts his head and eyes Steve plaintively. “I’ve learned that particular lesson. This does the opposite. I code the shield so it responds only to you. If it ever falls into Osborne’s hands, all it’d be good for is a paperweight.”

“Will blood do?”

“Perfectly.”

Steve rolls up his sleeve while Tony searches in his desk, coming up with a plastic-wrapped scalpel and a test tube.

“Any preferences?” Tony asks, motioning at Steve’s forearm with the scalpel.

Steve shrugs. “Surprise me.”

Tony smirks at that. He takes Steve’s arm with his free hand, dabbing rubbing alcohol onto a patch of skin a couple of inches above the elbow with the other. Then he carefully steadies the scalpel and digs in without warning. Steve appreciates the lack of warning, his muscles remembering to tense up only once Tony is already pulling away. The cut isn’t deep, but it’s bleeding freely, enough that Steve only has to tip his arm for blood to run down into the waiting test tube. They watch in silence.

Tony’s hand is very, very warm on Steve’s arm.

After a minute or two, Tony nods in satisfaction, stopping the tube up. He gives the cut a final wipe down, and this time Steve can’t help but hiss through his teeth.

“Sorry,” Tony says. “Band-aid, lollipop, the healing properties of a kiss?”

Steve glances up at Tony, but Tony is looking down at the tube of blood.

“No, I’ll survive,” Steve says. He watches the blood run back and forth as Tony turns it over and over in his hands. “If you sold that on eBay, you’d make a fortune.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I know. Just thinking out loud.”

“I’ll keep it somewhere safe,” Tony says. He looks up from the test tube at last, eyes wide and dark. “Would _your_ Tony have sold your blood?”

Steve hesitates, thinking it over.

“No,” he says, eventually. “He wouldn’t have. He might use it to build an evil robot clone, but he’d want to keep it all for himself. He’d want to keep it safe.”

*

There is Sharon’s face, looming over him wherever he turns, sayings things he can’t hear. There is Sharon’s face. There is Sharon’s face.

And then there is Tony, the real world’s Tony – _Stark_ , cradling the Iron Man helmet in his hands and heaving with the violence of his tears, and he’s whispering in a voice so tiny Steve has to lean in close to hear it, over and over again – _it wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t worth it_

Steve asks _worth what? worth what?_ and then he wakes up.

It’s dark, but the cave is glowing once again in the pallid light of the nanite scaffolding and the legion of television screens. Steve rolls over, craning to look up at the surveillance console. He can make out the dark shape of what can only be Tony, slumped over it. There is a crackling noise coming from the radio.

Steve pads over to the console. The monitors show nothing but noise. Tony is, he can see now, deeply and definitely asleep, his head buried in his arms and the microphone still resting loosely in his grip. Steve pulls it away, then he lifts the mic up to his lips.

“Hello?” he says. “Do you copy?”

The radio static rises and falls with his voice. Other than that, nothing.

“Pepper?” Tony mumbles.

Steve jumps, slotting the mic guiltly back into place in the console. Tony’s hand flexes against the panel, fingers brushing over buttons as if he’s petting it.

“Pep?”

“It’s Steve.”

“’m sorry. ‘m tryin’.” Tony sighs. His fingers curl around the microphone again. “Sorry, Pep.”

Steve looks down at him helplessly, then he untangles Tony’s hand from the mic and pulls Tony’s arm over his shoulders, dragging and lifting Tony onto his feet. “You need to go to bed,” he says gently, and he tows Tony towards his cot. The mansion is too far away right now, even if the steel door is unlocked.

Tony comes easily, asleep on his feet, but when Steve tries to detach him and lower him down onto the cot, he twists a hand into Steve’s shirt and holds on tight.

“Pepper,” he mumbles. “I’m trying.”

“I – I know you are,” Steve hazards. He puts on his best Pepper Potts voice, her particular brand of sternness that never quite hides the river of affection running beneath it, and he says, “Now let go and _sleep_.”

Tony obeys, slumping down onto the cot. He’s back out like a light. Steve stares down at him, still feeling that helplessness. Had his Tony Stark ever been this lonely? He doesn’t know. He'd never asked.

But behind him, the radio is crackling.

Steve turns and walks numbly back to the monitors. The screens come back to life in a wave as he watches them, starting in the top left corner and then spreading out, the images flickering back and forth until they settle on a channel; until finally, all of the screens are lit and humming. It’s Central Park, Steve realises, from dozens of different angles. He scans them all, searching for whatever it is the computer is trying to show him, but there’s nothing.

Steve presses a button at random and the screens all flick to new views, a mishmash of random shots of Manhattan, before they change obstinately back.

“Well, all right then,” Steve mutters. He picks up the mic and says, after a moment’s self-conscious pause, “Hello?”

“…Hi?” says the same tinny little voice from other night, recognisable now as Peter Parker. Steve grins. “Is that… T?”

“No, this is T’s – friend. He’s busy right now,” Steve adds, glancing to the side at Tony’s motionless form.

“T has friends?!” Peter squawks. He sounds amazed. Steve tries not to laugh. Then there’s another voice in the background, whispering something sharp and too fast for Steve to identity, and Peter mutters _okay, all right_ contritely. “So, um, Mr. T’s Friend. What’s happening?”

“Happening?”

“Well, T normally only contacts us once or twice a month, so if he’s getting in touch this soon after last time there must be something happening? Something going down? Shit that might even be in the process of getting real?”

Steve pauses, casting around for information. He stares up at the monitors. It must mean something. “Central Park,” he says. “Just keep an eye on Central Park.”

“That’s it? Wow, even for T that’s pretty vague.” The background whisperer interrupts again – Jess? Steve thinks – and Peter mutters back. “Okay, thanks for the mysterious info, T’s mysterious friend. Over and out.”

“Bye,” Steve says.

The radio cuts out, but he keeps on smiling down at it. They’re not alone. Tony doesn’t have to be alone. Maybe Steve can help fix this New York and then go home and fix his own. He can tell Stark _this is what happens when the world stops believing in superheroes_ and maybe Stark will listen.

He settles back in the chair and watches the monitors. A few experimental button pushes yield the same results as before: for a few seconds the channels change, and Steve catches brief glimpses of streets he’s walked down and buildings he knows; then every screen flicks back, column by column, to their views of the park.

“ _I’m_ not doing that,” Steve murmurs, running his hand across the edge of the console. “So who is?”

As if in answer, somehow, the monitors ripple and one image spreads, rolling out from the top left again, until the same view is showing on every screen. The message is clear, obvious. _Watch this._ So he watches. For a few seconds, there is only the trees and the grass and the night sky, all shades of grainy grey, and then a pair of dark figures step into view. Steve frowns.

“Zoom in,” he says. “Can you zoom in?”

He starts scanning the rows for a zoom button, but the computer is already responding to his voice command, drawing in tightly on the figures’ faces.

Steve huffs out a breath of laughter. Billy Kaplan. And the other kid must be Teddy, holding himself in that slightly self-conscious way, for all his face is too shadowed, too indistinct to make out. There is no way the Young Avengers could exist in a world that doesn’t even have the Avengers, but somehow the two of them found each other anyway. 

“Good on you,” Steve murmurs.

Then he stops smiling. There’s a flicker of movement at the bottom of the camera and a flash of metal. A dark shape creeping forwards. A gun. _They take kids_ , he thinks over the roar in his ears, _they take kids and nobody has taught these two how to fight._

The steel door is still unlocked. Steve runs.

*

Outside, the street is quieter than a street in New York City has any right to be. It’s three am in an alien universe where the streets are quiet and the people are scared, and Steve can deal with that. He jogs down Fifth Avenue towards the nearest park entrance, holding the image on the monitors in his mind. He knows the shape of those trees; if he focuses and mentally breaks the park down into a grid, he should be able to place them before he even reaches the path.

A shower of blue electrical sparks rain down on Steve from over the treetops. He stares.

“Or that works too,” he says, following the magical light display through the trees and into the park.

He surfaces in the middle of a battle, Billy shooting messy bolts of electricity at the dozen riot gear-clad opponents while Teddy is shifting over and over – from hulk-like creature, to ogre, to Skrull – as he throws punches. They’re untrained. The soldiers swagger cockily with their tranquiliser guns. Steve winces as he watches Billy throw his hand out an advancing soldier, only for the surge of electricity to sputter from his fingertips and die out.

The soldier laughs at that, his face twisted cruelly beneath his black mask.

“That the best you can do, freak?” he sniggers, lowering his gun and raising his free hand. “I can do better.”

“Duck!” Steve shouts to Billy, launching himself forward as the soldier snaps his fingers and throws his hands out with a _push_. Fire roars out of the soldier's fingertips too fast, blazingly hot, and for a second Steve reels back, dragging the Kaplan kid with him. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the other soldiers shouting, drawing back as well.

Steve hopes briefly, fervently, that the grass is too damp to burn. Then he kicks the soldier in the head. The soldier drops to his knees heavily and his arm falls to his side, fire still sputtering out of his hand. The grass smokes and hisses. In one quick movement, Steve grabs the guy by the wrist and wrenches until the shoulder dislocates and the fire dies.

As an afterthought, he kicks the forgotten tranq gun away. When he turns, the remaining – now slightly singed – soldiers raise their own guns to point at his chest. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve watches Billy and Teddy watching him.

“You won’t get away with this,” one of the soldiers says, but with a hint of uncertainty.

“Osborne has turned you into mutants so you can fight mutants,” Steve says. “Don’t you see the problem there? What are you going to do when your buddy here –” He jerks his head back towards the man groaning behind him. “ – loses control of the powers he isn’t meant to have and kills someone? Or do you only hunt the metahumans that can’t fight back?”

He stares at them all. A couple of the soldiers even look away.

“I will get away with this. You won’t.” Steve cracks his knuckles. “Now, leave.”

And they leave. Steve watches the men slink away, waiting until they’ve all disappeared before he allows himself to drag a hand down his face, allows himself a humourless smirk. Score one for this world: the bad guys aren’t used to fighting adult superheroes anymore.

“Billy, Teddy, are you two okay?”

“You know our names?” Billy squeaks. “But you’re Cap—” He cuts off with a gasp and then Teddy is shouting, “Look out!” and Steve spins around in time to see the disarmed soldier staggering to his feet, arm stretched out—

The repulsor blast cuts through the trees and into the soldier. He flies through the air, slamming into a tree trunk and sliding downwards as the blast cuts out. Steam rises from him as he crumples onto the ground.

Steve squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them again he can still see the after-images of the bright light floating in his vision, overlaid on Tony’s panicked face as he stumbles into the clearing. Tony turns around, squinting at the fallen soldier and then Billy and Teddy before his gaze lands on Steve at last.

“Everyone’s gone?”

Billy steps forward. “There was a fight, but you missed it. Um. Captain America saved us and…” He trails off, bewildered, as Tony sinks down onto the ground. “Are you okay?” 

“Experiencing technical difficulties,” Tony grits out. He’s cradling his hand awkwardly to his chest, holding his whole arm stiffly. There’s no Iron Man gauntlet or contraption or device; only Tony’s bare hand from which he somehow shot a repulsor blast.

Steve drops down next to him and pulls on Tony’s wrist. Tony surrenders easily, turning his hand palm upwards. Steve winces.

__“I left the implant sockets in my hands,” Tony explains. He sucks in a sharp breath as Steve’s fingers brush the ring of burnt skin around the repulsor disc plugged into Tony’s palm, then continues. “Incomplete. Stupid. Never bothered upgrading. It’ll be fine. I can feel the nanites working already.”__

____

____

Levering himself onto his feet with his uninjured hand on Steve’s shoulder, Tony turns to face Billy and Teddy.

“You two,” he says. “You need to leave town. You were already on the bad guy’s radar and this little affair really hasn’t helped. Get out while you can. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going,” he adds sharply, raising his hand. Billy’s eyes are fixed on the burnt and peeling skin in the centre of Tony's palm, his face pale. “Don’t say it out loud. Someone might hear you. Got it?”

“Yessir,” Teddy says. He tugs at Billy’s sleeve until Billy nods and mumbles his thanks. The two of them melt away into the trees. They’re smart kids in any universe. Steve knows they’ll be all right.

Tony stares after them, his back to Steve. Now that the action is over, the park seems suddenly and impossibly still. Steve listens for a shout or a fight or the wail of a siren, but there’s nothing. The leaves shiver. When he concentrates, he can hear Tony’s shallow breaths. Steve stares at his back, taking in the rumpled shirt he worked in all day and then slept in; and the way he holds himself so tensely, as if he’s ready and waiting for another fight to break out or for the stock market to crash. Back home, Tony stands this way as well. In all the possible universes, all the Tony Starks must stand this way.

“You,” Tony says softly. “You complete fucking idiot.”

Steve gapes. “What? Me?”

“Yes, you! Jesus Christ, Steve.” Tony rounds on him, his arms flung wide. “Running off to play hero to an audience of Mr. O’s finest and his all-seeing neighbourhood watch is stupid enough, but doing all that when you know people want to _cook and eat you?_ I wake up and you’re gone-”

“I’m sorry if I worried you,” Steve begins, but Tony cuts him off. 

“This isn’t worry! This? This isn’t me being worried for you. This is me wondering what the hell were you _thinking_?” he snarls. He twists away from Steve and ducks down to fiddle with the repulsor disc still lodged into his palm, breathing heavily as he twists it first one way and then the other with shaky fingers. “Fuck!”

Steve could help him. Instead, he crosses his arms over his chest and grinds out, “I was thinking that the life of two untrained teenagers is more important than my own.”

“Well, congratulations. You got your wish.” At last, Tony manages to unlatch the disc. He yanks it out of the socket and throw it onto the grass, where steam rises from it. “Those crazy kids are gonna make it and the bad guys know you exist. You realise we can’t go back home now? They’re going to rewind the footage and work out you came from Stark Manor and then Big Brother S will put together every stupid little slip-up that _almost_ gave me away and that’s it. That’s it, Steve. Game over.”

Steve stares at him. Tony’s eyes are shining and his face is too, too pale in the moonlight. There’s a streak of nanite fluid on his cheek, glittering strangely.

“Is that all that matters to you?” Steve asks softly. “Is that really all you’re ever going to do? Just keep hiding underground where it’s safe and you can _occasionally_ help the people who’re fighting it all, so long as you stay out of harm’s way?”

Tony turns away. “This is over. I’m going. I don’t know where, but I’m going.”

“On my world, Tony Stark might be a fascist asshole, but he never hides.”

“Yeah, well, maybe that’s because he had you.”

Steve freezes. Tony is already walking away, back towards the road and then onwards to Steve doesn’t know where. A place where he can disappear. Steve knows he can’t let that happen. He jogs after Tony, catching him by the elbow as Tony weaves through the trees. Streetlights shining through the branches.

“What do you mean?” Steve says.

Tony doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look at him.

“I mean,” he tells the open air, “I’ve known you for, what? Two weeks. I could have just kept you in a block of ice and we’d be safe now, but I didn’t, and already you make me feel like things could change. Maybe you’re the reason why the Avengers in your world held together, and why Tony Stark’s still Iron Man. Maybe your world took so much longer to fall apart because you were there. But you weren’t _here_.”

A beam of light passes across Tony’s face, shining on the smudge of nanite liquid and the curve of a cheekbone, the angle of his nose. The lights catches on the corner of his mouth as his lips part, drawing in a breath.

Steve curls his fingers around Tony’s bicep.

“I just do my job,” he says.

“Yeah. Well, I couldn’t hold onto my job.” Tony smiles wryly. “I couldn’t hold onto my company, I couldn’t hold onto my tech. I couldn’t hold onto the lives of the people who trusted me. Maybe I don’t give a damn about this... this war, or whatever the hell it is. I’m not a superhero. I’m just trying to extend our motley crew of superheroes’ stupid, heroic life expectancies.”

“Tony—” 

“And yours. I’m trying to extend _yours_. Which means,” Tony declares, easing himself out of Steve’s grip and clapping his hands together, all sarcastic cheer again, “we need to find somewhere safe to hide until they’re done ripping apart my basement.”

Steve’s hand lingers in the air once Tony’s left it. His fingers curl in on themselves and for a second Steve just looks at them, frowning.

“I think I know a place,” he says.

*

There’s some horror B-movie playing in the late night screening at Steve’s favourite crummy movie theatre. Tony had twitchily insisted they went in and bought their tickets separately, so the place is deserted when Steve ambles inside. Ticket purchased – and a cheerful story told about how his girlfriend was coming later, had picked the film, she was the one who liked these scary movies, not him – he grabs a Sprite and a handful of paper napkins before making his way to the screen. There’s a few other people inside, but Tony is easy to spot – he’s sitting at the end of an aisle, as if he just fallen into the first seat he saw. He’s holding himself very still.

“Here,” Steve says softly, dropping into the seat behind him. He scoops a handful of ice out of his drink and into the napkins. “For your hand.”

“Thanks,” Tony mutters. He takes the bundle of ice and flops back in his seat, strings cut. Steve hears him sigh as he presses the ice against his palm.

Up on the screen, a young woman screams. She claws away from the monster attacking her, her skimpy nightdress catching on shards of glass. Steve can’t remember what the movie is called or what the monster’s purpose is. He watches the light flicker across Tony’s face as the woman runs out of the house and into the trees, passing through shadows and moonlight and shadows. Tony’s pale face.

At least, Steve reflects, she didn’t run up the stairs.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“Maybe.” Tony tilts his head slightly, turned so that Steve can see the corner of his eye and of his smile. “Maybe I should.”

“But,” Steve mutters, “you’re not going to.”

One of the few other moviegoers shushes them loudly, so Steve settles back in his seat. The woman on screen is still alive, edging down a corridor with her back to the wall, her hair a mess and her nightdress torn, her panicked breathing filling the screenroom in surround sound. Steve watches the back of Tony’s head. The other Tony in the other world could easily plough through several days without sleep, without worry. This isn’t, he has to remind himself, keeps on having to remind himself, that same Tony.

The room smells of buttered popcorn, and musty upholstery, and warm bodies; it smells of the comfort of childhood. Steve lets his eyes close, just for a moment.

And—

Tony, the real Tony, standing at a podium before a crowd. It’s a funeral, Steve somehow knows. Tony’s lips are moving and Steve is straining to listen, but someone behind him keeps firing a gun. Sound roaring in his ears. The gun fires again and this time Steve feels it. Hands against his stomach, blood slick. He can see Sharon in the distance, disappearing into the crowd.

“It wasn’t worth it.” Suddenly Tony is right in front of him, leaning over him. They’re in an empty room that Steve almost recognises.

 _Don’t just stand there, can’t you see I’m bleeding?_ he tries to say, but he can’t move his lips, can’t move his hands; he’s already dead.

Tony says, “It wasn’t worth it”, and then someone is screaming and Steve wakes up. He jerks upright, blinking in the dim light and rubbing at his eyes. A character on screen is dying violently, but it feels very far away. A part of Steve is still in that other room, watching Tony cry.

*

The movie ends in a bloodbath, of course, and the morning is cold and bright and too damn early. They walk home; or to, Steve can’t help but darkly think, whatever is left of home.

“I saw that ending coming a mile off,” Tony mutters. His mouth slides into a crooked shit-eating kind of smile, but his voice is too flat, too strained, as if his vocal chords haven’t yet caught up with the brain’s command to make a joke. His eyes are grim, his face grey with exhaustion; the smile falls away before it’s even really begun.

“Doesn’t take a Stark level IQ to work it out,” Steve says easily, playing along despite himself. Tony hadn’t slept at all.

As they round the corner, Steve can see that Stark Manor’s front doors are slightly ajar, a slice of darkness gaping through that is visible even from the sidewalk. He stills, tapping Tony on the arm, then nods through the gates towards it.

It takes Tony – half-asleep, out of practice, _civilian_ Tony – a second to catch up, his eyes drifting unseeing across the face of the manor. Steve feels the moment when Tony realises, when his arm stiffens under Steve’s finger and his jaw clenches.

“I guess we’ll go in the back way then,” Tony says.

He leads Steve past the gates and past the walls of the ground and into a small alley instead. His movements are stiff, restrained, and about halfway down the alley he stops moving altogether, pushing his hands into his pockets and tilting his head back to stare up at the sky.

“I know you’re watching, you bastard,” he says, simply.

There’s a soft click and then the ground sinks in on itself, the tarmac rattling and clicking as it folds into a flight of stairs, descending under the alley into darkness. With a faint smile, Tony draws his hand out of his pocket to reveal his car keys, his thumb still pressed over one of the buttons on the key chain.

“Ta-da.” Tony turns, jerking his head at Steve. “And for my next trick, I disappear.”

“Wait. Tony--” Steve follows him down the stairs into the half-light – the walls are brick but covered in the same glowing nanite fluid as the cave. “This could be dangerous. Get behind me. We don’t know who or what’s still down there.”

Tony ignores him, taking the steps two at a time.

Steve sighs. “Are you so stubborn in every universe?”

They reach the bottom of the stairs. Behind them the flight was folding back up, the facade of tarmac slotting into place to leave no trace behind. They’re left in a short expanse of corridor, brickwork at one end and rock face at the other.

“Maybe. But they’ve got what they came for. They won’t have stuck around. _I’m_ ,” he adds, with a hint of amusement, “not a threat.”

“But I could be.”

“It’s okay, Steve.” Tony jams a key into the wall of rock and twists it. “They already think they’ve won.”

There’s an incredible groaning creak, as if stone were sliding against stone – which, Steve realises as a portion of the rock face opens up before them, it is. He follows Tony through the doorway, only to walk into Tony’s suddenly rigid back when Tony stops in front of him. Steve hears him suck in a sharp breath.

“Perhaps they have,” Tony murmurs and he starts moving again, stepping out into the cave. Glass crunches under his feet.

They emerge somewhere in the back of the cave, a storage area Steve recognises by the shape of the walls despite its transformation. The place has been torn apart. Systematically, he notes, taking in the totality of the debris on the floor. Everything had been taken from the shelves and destroyed before the shelves themselves were pushed over, for maximum destruction. It’s created an alien landscape in the glow of the nanites, metal shelves teetering against each other like dominoes. They’re lucky the doorway in the rock hadn’t been blocked altogether.

“Be careful,” Steve warns as he begins to pick his way through the mess. “Looks like it could all collapse any second. Tony?” He glances back. Tony hasn’t moved from his place in the doorway.

“Won, I mean,” Tony says distantly. He seems to shake himself as Steve watches him, his head jerking up to take in the rest of the destruction. “Perhaps they have already won. Come on, I need to see—”

 _Everything_ , Steve fills in silently as Tony trails off, picking his way through a clear path and out into the main chamber. It’s the same story the further into the cave they go; the delicate things crushed underfoot and everything too big to stamp on knocked over. Steve spots the piece of scrap metal that served as his temporary shield lodged in one of the surveillance monitors. He pulls it out, ignoring the glass that sprinkles down into his hair, and turns it over in his hands. It seems impossible that he was miming throws only yesterday.

He says, slowly, “This place could be bugged.”

“Could be.”

Tony’s voice is toneless. Steve turns to find him sitting on the torn-apart remains of a desk chair, his hands resting loosely on his knees. There’s a blank kind of look in his eyes.

“We need to move.”

Tony shakes his head. “Not yet.”

“If the Sentry’s watching, someone could be coming for us already. Unless you’re trying to stage some kind of stupid, underprepared government infiltration, we have to move.”

“They won’t come,” Tony murmurs. “I’m unimportant and they’ve got what they need from you.”

“What do you—” Steve pauses, looking down at the scrap metal still in his hands. He drops it abruptly. “The blood sample.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Standing suddenly, Tony spreads his arms and raises his voice, eyes scanning the cave walls until his gaze fixes on one point, before quickly drifting away again. “I hadn’t anticipated an attack like this.”

It’s a performance, Steve realises, for the bug Tony’s now spotted; and when Tony’s fingers crook for a second in a beckoning motion, Steve strides forwards, grabbing Tony’s shirt by the collar.

“I’ve got it,” Tony whispers the moment Steve is close enough to hear. “Swapped samples last night. Probably enough enhancements in my blood to fool them for a while.” 

“You paranoid son of a bitch,” Steve breathes, impressed, before he steps back and gives Tony a rough shake and says loudly, “I shouldn’t have trusted you.” 

“I guess not.” Tony stumbles as Steve pushes him away, falling back down into his broken chair. Steve turns away. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs deeply; it’s only partly performance. His DNA might still be safe, but nothing else in this world seems to be.

“I’ll salvage what I can,” Tony says eventually, quietly. “Then we move.”

“What can I do?”

“That depends on how much you know about biotechnics.” 

“Not a lot,” Steve admits.

Tony laughs at that, the amusement bringing a spark of life back into his face. “Then just see if you can find a screwdriver in this hellhole and get the front panel off the monitor console. There’s something I need in there.”

*

Tony’s workstation is a mess, the desk drawers emptied all over the floor and the paperwork torn into shreds. Steve wishes he had a broom, wishes he could do something to fix the place up instead of just dismantling it further. As it is, he kicks the broken glass and metal and shattered lab equipment away, picks up and stacks the overturned drawers, then gathers the papers together into a neater pile.

None of it seems important enough to save – this Tony hasn’t run a company and a superhero team in a long time. After riffling through the sheath of papers, Steve sets it aside and picks through the rest of the rubbish until he finds a small screwdriver. It’s the same one Tony stuck into his arm only a week ago. The screw head is probably too small, Steve thinks, but he could make it work if there’s nothing else. He sets it carefully on the heavily scratched surface of the workstation. Fresh, new scratches. Osborne’s men destroyed everything they could touch.

“Bastards,” Steve murmurs, and he startles at the sound of his own voice, the first he’s heard since he and Tony went their separate ways in the cave. In the distance, he can see Tony moving about agitatedly, collecting odds and ends that are undoubtedly more important than Steve can ever understand. Without him close by, the place seems too dead, too silent for speech.

Steve runs his hand across the scarred desktop, then ducks down to look underneath.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Steve finds a photo of Pepper under the desk. He and Tony talk about Pepper and it's revealed that she died some years ago, but Tony managed to ~replicate her brainwaves~ or whatever to create the AI that runs his surveillance. Tony had promised her that he would keep looking after NYC. He removes the Pepper circuit board from his super computer.
> 
> \- Tony manages to contact the Avengers (in a cave, with a box of scraps) and Steve and Tony make it to their hide out. All the gang is there! All very dystopian etc.
> 
> \- Steve rallies the troops, makes a moving speech about how they can't keep hiding forever and they need to make a stand. TRAINING MONTAGE.
> 
> \- Tony makes some cool cyberpunk gadgets, including a coolass holographic shield for Steve (this was an element of the art; it looked so cool). Steve is touched. And then _touched_. i.e. THEY KISS WITH TONGUES.
> 
> \- Steve keeps on having weird and disconcerting dreams throughout this all, which just keep on getting weirder and more disconcerting. Something doesn't feel right??
> 
> \- Big Boss Battle, defeating Norman Osborne and rescuing Sentry, who had effectively been turned into a human computer type super surveillance big brother thing.
> 
> \- ????
> 
> \- I don't really remember the intricacies of how this was meant to work but: Sentry somehow or something reveals that this is all a computer simulation that 616 Tony is plugged into in the real world in his super sad quest to find the perfect scenario of Steve Doesn't Die, into which in true Tony Hot Mess Stark fashion he has gone too deep
> 
> \- Simulation Steve persuades Tony to gtfo back to the real world
> 
> \- it's a bummer, I guess
> 
> \- And I Never Signed Up For a Fic Challenge Again


End file.
